BA168 Shanghai - London 17-07-07 Club Class

Pouilly-Fume les Pierres Blanches 2005, Domiane Masson-Blondelet
Very good crisp chardonay I don't know the Domaine but I love the appelation.
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Chateau Arnauld 2004, Cru Bourgeois Haut Medoc.
Nothing wrong with this Haut Medoc, deep red mostly Merlot with some Cap Franc and Petit Verdot mixed in if memory serves but BA was serving it too cold.

This is a twelve hour daytime flight so we had two meals. For lunch I had:

Hot Smoked salmon, with cucumber salad and wasabi dressing
This was very good, and at the right temperature for once. The trick with hot smoking fatty fish like salmon is not to overdo it which makes the fish salty. This one was perfectly smoked and the wasabi and cucumber combination was just the right kind of light touch that was needed.

Mark Edwards' halibut in black bean sauce, bock choy and egg fried rice
(Mark Edwards is part of the BA culinary council and the say he's "specialist on Asian inspired cuisine, London")
Basically slices of fish in some sort of fairly heavy dough fried and reheated until you just could not decide wich was worse the oilyness of the dough or the dead dryness of the fish. I find the pride that BA attaches to its Culinary Council very ironic considering the utter crap they produce.

I never take the dessert on BA as I've never had anything resembling eatable desserts with the airline.

For what BA calls a Light Meal I had:

Parma Ham, grilled goat's cheese and basil salad

Basically a very good idea for an airline dish. Get the logistics right and this is very easy to handle dish that copes well with waiting while refridgerated. BA however was quite cabable of turning this into a disaster. The parma ham should have been thin slices of reasonable quality but where instead slabs of some horrid cheap ham. You really had to work at chewing this stuff and any pensioners with fake teeth could have forgotten about it. The goat's cheese did not look grilled it looked and tasted like it had been caught in a fire. The final insult; the basil salad was three completely vilted leaves of basil!

Sweet & Sour Pork with shiitake mushrooms and steamed rice
This dish was so unspeakably bad that only comparison with school food or possibly '80's vintage Russian airline food would capture how dreadful it was. Even the rice was uneatable.

Selection of fruit
At last one thing they got right

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